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Don’t you wish your skin could do this? A glowing skin for robots can also be stretched to more than six times its original size. It was inspired by octopuses, whose colour-changing organs and flexible bodies allow them to modify their posture and hue for communication and camouflage.

The material is made of an array of bendy, light-emitting capacitors sandwiched between thin rubber sheets. The capacitors, which respond to deformations and changes in pressure, can act as sensors. Stretching the artificial skin increases the electric field, causing it to emit more light.

Adding different metals to the capacitors results in a variety of colours: adding copper creates blue light, for example. The material can also endure twice as much strain as some existing stretchy displays.

Developed by Robert Shepherd at Cornell University, New York, and his team, the skin was incorporated into a robot that lights up as it crawls (see video). In the future, the team hopes that the skin will allow robots to change colour based on input from their environment – they could, for example, respond to a human’s mood or the atmosphere in a room.

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Mike Tolley from the University of California in San Diego, who developed a rubbery robot that can resist snow, flames and getting run over, thinks the system has potential. “I can imagine this type of display being used in the context of service robotics, entertainment, or many other applications,” he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aac5082

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